It is important to remember people with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities were a key target in the eugenics movement in the United States – which influenced Hitler’s first mass murders under the Aktion-T4 program in 1939. Through that program, Hitler murdered an estimated 200,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, a large number being people with Down syndrome.
It is important to remember up until 1984 doctors in the United States refused to provide lifesaving procedures to people with Down syndrome such as surgeries related to the heart. Even today, there are people with Down syndrome dying in their 30s or 40s simply because a doctor refused to perform the heart surgery when they were infants.
It is important to remember there were numerous unprosecuted cases wherein doctors and fathers conspired and told mothers of newborns with Down syndrome that their babies had died, when in fact, those babies were quickly and quietly placed in inhumane institutions.
It is important to remember people with Down syndrome and other intellectual disabilities were systematically physically and sexually abused through forced sterilization – by 1981, more than 60,000 people with disabilities had been violated in this manner.
It is important to remember there were doctors as late as the 1980s who categorized feeding a baby with Down syndrome as a “lifesaving procedure” and proceeded to starve babies to death with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities until all 50 state governors created legislation to ban this horrific practice.
It is important to remember children with Down syndrome and other intellectual and developmental disabilities living in institutions were infected en masse in experiments related to vaccine discovery.
It is important for us to remember that our friends and family members with Down syndrome deserve fundamental human and civil rights. Only within this context can we prevent atrocities from surfacing again and prevent discrimination of all forms from happening now.
